Teaching Innovation Through Empathy

Abstract

Innovation is a crucial component for the growth and competitive advantage of organizations. Organizations today require effective processes of idea generation and implementation to remain relevant and competitive and, as a result, now search less for workers with highly specialized knowledge and more so for the ability to innovate. Students, especially business students who will lead the next generation of organizations, need to be better prepared with innovation skills to meet these requirements and to sustain successful careers. One promising approach for realizing these goals is design thinking. This article shows how design thinking can be incorporated through an adaptation of a design project experience created by Stanford University’s “d.school” into the undergraduate business classroom. This 1-hour, in-class exercise allowed students to apply design thinking principles that can contribute to their fluency in the design process and their skills in innovative thinking.